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Teen Blog

The holiday shopping season is looming which means it’s time for a new round of eReaders to be introduced from Amazon, Barnes & Noble, and maybe, just maybe, Apple, and there will be several months of us giving them our money. But before you buy, read on to find out exactly what you’re getting into, in terms of both hardware and retailer.

When the Web was still new, it was necessary to know how to code in order to create a Web page. Languages like HTML, CSS, Javascript and more were the tools in your utility belt to build a Web presence. The truly savvy could (and can) do most of this with nothing more than a plain text editor, though most people turned to programs like Dreamweaver to more easily and quickly assemble entire sites. Then you had to choose your Web hosting service. Then you had to FTP your pages to the hosting service. . . it was an involved process. I haven’t done any professional Web design in close to a decade so I couldn’t tell you what the pros are up to these days, but I’ll tell you what I tell all my training-on-demand students: who cares? Use a Web site builder service to streamline the process. It will save you time, grief, brain power, and probably some money!

I see it all the time: PCs choking on gobs of uninvited software to the point where they barely function. They may be Web browser toolbars or antivirus utilities or programs that promise to speed up your computer, when in fact they do exactly the opposite. It enrages me to see programs like these on my customers’ computers because I know that they did not knowingly install these programs--these programs waltzed in with another that the customer did want. This sort of software is referred to as “sneakware.” Here are some strategies to prevent this from happening to you!

For some area eighth grade students and their school librarians, summer didn’t just mean relaxing by the pool and catching up on sleep. Instead, they attended biweekly meetings to discuss forty-one nominated titles for the public library’s 2013 Cafe Book classes --book discussions for seventh and eighth graders in area schools. This committee provides a rare opportunity, as adults and teens serve side by side, brought together by a shared passion--books. Teens told us they appreciated that their “opinion was encouraged and taken seriously” and “valued” by the adults. It all came down to a final meeting with the goal to choose only twenty titles. You can imagine the debate that ensued as each book’s plot, characters and appeal were considered. Finally, the list was decided, unfortunately leaving behind some wonderful titles. Here are some of my favorites that were “left on the cutting room floor.”

Jake Knight seems to have it all. He's a fifteen-year-old technology whiz who can jump a ten-foot wall with his parkour skills. He's enrolled in a nice British school, and his dad is an ambassador to the small West African country of Burkina Faso. To Jake, Africa is a land of excitement and adventure...and he will soon learn that it is also the land of the Outlaw.

Jake thinks his boarding school life is pretty lame and spends his time playing Geothimble, a scavenger hunt that uses GPS technology. When Jake's extracurricular activity gets him suspended, he is sent to his father's embassy. Jake could not be happier, but little does he know that he's about to get enough excitement to last a lifetime.

Our smartphones are our lives. Go ahead and deny it, but deep down you know you get jittery when you aren’t caressing your tiny portable computer that basically hands you the digital world on a tempered glass tray. As I pointed out in my Must-Have Android and Must-Have iPhone apps articles there are a lot of apps out there that’ll do just about anything. But there’s lots more that we can do to customize our smartphones and our tablets, especially for Android. Sorry Apple users, your fantastic apps may bring all the boys to the yard, but Android has you beat fair and square on the customizability front. Sure, you could jailbreak your iPhone or iPad (Google it if you dare, just know you’ll be put out in the cold if you take a busted jail-broken device to the Apple Genius Bar), but I’m not going to risk going there, so Android users, this one’s for you!

Sometimes catastrophe rains down on our PCs. We turn them on and . . . nothing happens. Could be any number of factors: virus; aging hardware; broken software update. And, of course, sometimes things just go bad. Sad thing is, we're never ready for these events when they happen. Our files aren't backed up to any external media, and, with our PCs not running properly, we don’t have any easy way of retrieving them. Sure, you could take the computer to a repair shop or run the factory recovery discs that may have come with the machine, but you run a very real chance either way, especially the latter way, of losing your files. So, I'm going to tell you how you how you might be able to salvage your files, if not your computer, for free using Linux.

I've written a few articles advising our users to back up their data. Every so often, usually when we need them the most or when the warranty has expired, our computers stop working. This wouldn't be so horribly bad if we'd backed up our files first. So, let me reiterate for anyone who has read me before that backing-up your data means that the same files are stored in two completely different places. If you've copied all your important files to an external hard drive, but then erased them from your laptop, they are not backed-up; maybe your external hard drive goes kaput, and, even though your computer is still working, all those files are lost from the external device, aren't they? To back up your files they absolutely need to be in two different places. Redundancy is the name of the game, and I'm going to teach you how to play (wow that sounded corny).

Every year, teens across the country read and select their favorite fiction books of the year. That’s right – teens read. Despite the many online attractions and distractions, teens are reading books voraciously, and they have strong opinions on what they enjoy. Each year, teens from Maine to California and every state in-between participate in selecting the Teens’ Top Ten (TTT), a list of the top ten fiction books for young adults. YALSA, the Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, is the creator of the Teens’ Top Ten and coordinates the event.

In his autobiographical novel for young people, Bad Boy, Walter Dean Myers wrote of a world--1940s Harlem--that was markedly different from that of today. Most families were tightly-knit as was the community itself. Even so, it wasn’t a perfect place. As he grew up his family struggled to get by, and, as he became a teenager, he became more aware of racism and how it could affect his future.

But during his early years, he didn’t think too much about race. He had friends who were white and black, and the woman he thought of as his mother was of German and Native American ancestry. The man who raised him, though not his biological father, was African American. Herbert and Florence Dean took Walter and his half-sisters in to be fostered when they needed a loving and caring home.